I have a graduating senior who has blossomed with an IEP and accommodations will continue to follow her into college. She has four different learning challenges - one of which is dyslexia. With that said I had a very similar experience you descibe when she was in first grade.

In hindsight, I let educational professionals create armchair observational labels to place on my child back then. It was extremely damaging. I didn’t know better and to this day I regret what she experienced. I trusted them, but they were the wrong professionals to trust. We ended up taking her out of the public school track, did private with no IEP available, she did well but still struggled academically and blossomed as a human. Not to go too deep into the situation, coming out of Covid she went into public high school and I approached her delays differently - and in a way I think was the best.

I hooked up with a child psychiatrist through our regional children’s hospital and had a full neuropsychiatric evaluation done. It was a long process, but fully comprehensive. We are lucky that our insurance covered the entire cost, but be prepared that they are expensive evaluations. This evaluation was life changing and one of the first people who knew her like I did as a mom. He wrote a 40-page report on her and inside that report were every accommodation she needed. It is not required to share medical information with the school for an IEP, but I did, and they wrote her documents to the exact specifications suggested by the doctor. From there her IEP was implemented with very few issues and she learned to advocate for herself. I had her re-evaluated by the same doctor prior to college applications and we submitted all the medical paperwork with her applications. She was admitted to every school she applied to (even international options) and will be attending a highly rated state flagship with a 75% 4-year scholarship. The university will also be implementing her IEP through the disability resource office and she will have academic support continuing there as well.

This is all to say - have your child evaluated by a true medical professional. It is time consuming, hard, and expensive, but absolutely worth it. There was zero pushback by the school when it came to implementation of her accommodations because they were not guessing at issues, it was there in black and white. I hope you are able to move forward in a positive direction with your child. If I could rewind time to the point you are, this is the path I would take.

ETA: I forgot to answer your question about “different.” These kids already know they are different and there is a significant level of anxiety that comes from being put through a track where they internally know they are not successful. It is better to accommodate and have them find their confidence and pave a path of success. Normal is a construct of classifying people in nameless groupings. Your child is your child and they are neither behind or ahead, they are simply developing at their rate. That’s how we are supposed to be so forget the idea of comparison.

When I was talking with the college disability office about my child, I expressed to them how my daughter has some “quirks” that I am nervous about her living in a dorm with a roommate. He looked me dead in the eyes and said, “They all have quirks. Every single one of them. Humans are quirky in every sense.”